Inhaling Xenon gas is known to be a psychoactive experience, which I only learned about on the show Hamilton’s Pharmacopoeia. He claims the atomic structure of Xenon, by pure chance, fits nicely into one of the psychoactive receptors in the brain.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt14099126/?ref_=ttep_ep_3
https://boingboing.net/2021/11/25/hamilton-morris-experience...
Isn't Xenon infamous for being ridiculously expensive? It's the best general anesthetic by a mile since it's a noble gas, but we don't use it because the cost would be absurd. While the amounts used here must be small, and you're going to be stacked if this is how you're approaching Everest, it must still cost a small fortune — and turns out it does:
> One session of xenon gas costs $5,000 per person for a 30-minute session.
The prices in the article are what the company is charging for their services, not the gas itself.
The gas itself is under $100 per liter depending on purity.
The depending on purity is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, to the point where I would say it's misleading. I don't know the price for xenon off the top of my head, but for a comparison with nitrous oxide, food grade is generally between 99% and 99.9% pure. If you want medical grade, the threshold is 99.99% pure or better, depending on what you're doing. Those additional nines are what drive the price up, plus the fact that someone signed off on it with their name. Food grade is cheap, medical is expensive. No one is going to go up Everest with anything below medical.
What does the additional .09% of purity get you - if the xenon or nitrous is mixed with air at inhalation time anyway? For example, divers and pilots use ABO oxygen which is only 99.5% pure.
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2023/december/p...
> The depending on purity is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, to the point where I would say it's misleading.
Not really. The range of prices doesn't change by multiple orders of magnitude. At small quantities the cost of the ancillary equipment might be as much as the gas. I guarantee you they're not buying $5000 of pristine gas per client.
One of the hardest parts of dealing with Xenon is getting the last little bits of Krypton gas out. Very small doses of Krypton gas are inert and not really a health issue. The research grade Xenon has to be higher purity because many experiments rely on it being the only gas present.
> No one is going to go up Everest with anything below medical.
Companies who do Everest expeditions vary greatly. There's a lot of history of bad behavior among companies around Everest. Just because it's expensive and their clientele is wealthy, you shouldn't assume they're operating according to the highest standards. There's a long history of badly behaving companies around Everest.
> The cost of xenon is roughly $10 per liter. For comparison, helium, another noble gas, costs around 10 cents per liter. Argon and neon cost about $2 per liter each.
From another link in the comments: https://tripsitter.substack.com/p/xenon
Pretty sure your source is wrong. And that helium is 10_$_ a liter not 10¢. As helium is much, much more expensive than argon.
ah, rich people sports...
How does Xenon act as an anaesthetic if it's a noble gas and chemically inert?
It's not completely chemically inert, but the actual mechanism that makes it work as an anesthetic is unknown (as, unnervingly, are most general anesthetics).
> unnervingly
Pun intended?
We don’t know!
Nitrous Oxide is inert in the body as well.
It's not chemically inert (1), but even if it were it could still disrupt cell membrane function by physical effects, like dissolving into the lipids.
(1) For example, a mixture of xenon and fluorine, when exposed to sunlight, makes crystals of xenon difluoride.
According to the article, 154,000 USD.
That may be considered ridiculously expensive, noble, absurd, and or a small fortune to some, but to others it's relatively irrelevant, on the order of supersizing your fast food order.
Are they joining the Mile High club? https://tripsitter.substack.com/p/xenon
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40804827
Wow, that really does sound like a much more potent nitrous oxide trip. Back in my less responsible days I definitely dabbled in "hippie crack", and you could sort of hit that state if you took enough and / or combined it with other drugs.
(fwiw, I don't take any drugs anymore, except for the occasional night drinking. I had some horrifically bad trips that felt like my consciousness was smeared across the entire universe, suffering for eternity. Took me a long time to recover, and the message I took away was "anything you can learn on drugs you can learn in other, safer ways".)
If it gets them to the top of Everest, it would probably be the 5.5 mile high club.
Hypoxic altitude tents have always interested me as a runner living in sea-level San Francisco. You're supposed to sleep in them for a few weeks in order to simulate being at higher elevation. However, they're apparently pretty terrible to use - the vacuum is loud enough to disrupt sleep, the inside of the tent is supposed to get hot and sticky, and you need to spend 12+ hours a day to get real benefits. If you're mountaineering, the suffering might be worth it, but if you're a hobby jogger the sleep disruptions alone negate the performance impact of the EPO boost. Supposedly.
But Xenon?
> Furtenbach, whose training rides and runs have been 10 percent faster for days after xenon-fuelled climbs...
Something to muse about.
> > Furtenbach, whose training rides and runs have been 10 percent faster for days after xenon-fuelled climbs...
Furtenbach is the person selling the $5,000 Xenon sessions.
Keep that in mind when considering the claims.
I listened to a podcast recently about a hypoxic training that was interesting. The company makes masks and different levels of equipment for different uses. For me it a simple curiosity, I need to work on recovering from ~1.5 years taking care of an ill family member. Maybe then it is worth a thought but for me it seems unlikely to really appeal.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/95-brian-oestrike-ceo-...
> For me it a simple curiosity, I need to work on recovering from ~1.5 years taking care of an ill family member. Maybe then it is worth a thought but for me
Hypoxic training would be detrimental to an untrained athlete. Restricting your oxygen intake would reduce the volume and duration of exercise you could tolerate, which would slow your progress.
So please don't use a hypoxic training mask. It would do the opposite of what you want to achieve.
Even within athletes the benefits of hypoxic training for general performance are questionable once you get away from people with a vested interest in pushing it (like the person interviewed in your podcast).
"You did not climb Everest. You brought it down to your level."
- Yvon Chouinard
I can't find a source for this quote or one that fits this pattern. Do you have one?
The guides practically carry them up the mountain, make their beds, maybe put a little mint on their pillow. It's an absolute joke. They try to bring the mountain down to their level.
From: https://www.tpl.org/resource/conversation-yvon-chouinard-lan...
Ah, I hadn't broadened my search terms enough to find that. Thanks!
Referenced article (How to climb Everest in a week, Financial Times, January 11 2025)
This is an article about an article that is basically a marketing puff piece for the company selling the service.
As always, it's hard to tell if this is really a trend or if the company is just hoping to FOMO their way into paying customers by planting news articles about it being a trend. I'm 99% sure it's the latter.
The source for this article is a .PDF file of an FT.com article that is hosted on the website of the company selling the Xenon-assisted tours : https://www.furtenbachadventures.com/wp-content/uploads/How-...
So color me skeptical.
All these rich assholes should just go shark diving without a cage while spectators on a boat can pay for buckets of chum to toss
Who cares? If a helicopter could reach the summit, I would take a helicopter. More people should drive to the north pole, too.
The north pole is interesting, because everyone who raced to reach it the first time was using the most cutting edge stuff they had, right?
I wonder how you'd do that experience now?
You did not climb Everest on Xenon gas and you are shameful for risking the lives of Sherpa people if you try.
Well, I guess it depends upon what you're trying to prove. Are you as tough as Reinhold Messner? Do it without O2. Are you rich enough to get your body to 29,032'? Do this.
Beginner mountaineers paying a bunch of sherpas to drag them to the top of Everest already wasn't much of an achievement. This just lowers the bar even more.
Climbing Everest assisted is still a monumental personal achievement. I'm proud of my even more modest adventures in the Himalayas.
Visiting just one page on this wacky website absolutely trashed my browser's (Firefox) back-history.
I was just about to comment on that ... I wonder if that's on purpose or if it's just poor coding on the site
Here is my response…
The Dangerous Trend of Xenon-Accelerated Everest Climbs By Anthony David Adams, NOLS Wilderness First Responder
A concerning trend is emerging in high-altitude mountaineering: the proposed use of xenon gas to dramatically shorten Mount Everest climbing expeditions from the traditional 6-8 weeks to just 7 days. As a wilderness first responder, I must emphasize the severe risks this approach poses to climbers.
Understanding Traditional Acclimatization The standard two-month Everest expedition timeline isn't arbitrary - it's a carefully calculated protocol that allows climbers' bodies to make crucial physiological adaptations. During proper acclimatization, the body gradually develops more red blood cells, strengthens respiratory muscles, and creates new blood vessels to cope with extreme altitudes. These changes can't be safely accelerated.
The Xenon Shortcut: A Recipe for Disaster Xenon gas, banned in sports since 2014, artificially stimulates erythropoietin (EPO) production, increasing red blood cell counts. While this might seem like a clever shortcut to altitude adaptation, it creates a perfect storm of potentially fatal complications:
Critical Medical Risks: 1. Severe Altitude Illnesses: Rapid ascent drastically increases the risk of acute mountain sickness (AMS), high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), and high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE) - all of which can be fatal within hours above 8,000 meters.
2. Blood Clotting Dangers: High altitude naturally increases blood viscosity. Adding xenon-induced EPO production creates an unprecedented risk of lethal blood clots, strokes, and heart attacks in an environment where medical evacuation is often impossible.
3. Unpredictable Responses: Individual reactions to xenon-induced EPO can vary dramatically, making it impossible to predict or control blood thickness at extreme altitudes.
Beyond Biology: The Human Factor Technical climbing skills, extreme weather awareness, and high-altitude decision-making abilities cannot be compressed into a week-long timeline. The mountain demands respect and patience - there are no shortcuts to developing the judgment needed for survival in the Death Zone.
A Call to Action As wilderness medical professionals, we have a responsibility to strongly advise against this dangerous trend. Artificial EPO stimulation through xenon use cannot replace the complex physiological adaptations required for safe high-altitude climbing. The promise of a quick summit isn't worth the extreme risks to human life.
The time-tested approach to Everest remains the only responsible path: proper acclimatization, thorough training, and respect for the mountain's demands. No breakthrough in EPO manipulation can safely replace these fundamental requirements for survival at extreme altitude.
What's the HN etiquette around claiming that a reply is AI generated?
Totally AI generated. I gave it my notes and pasted output. Just want to warn people that xenon is dangerous for this type of thing.
Thanks for the writeup! And I'd add, from a philosophical prospective, if you're doing this Xenon protocol, if Sherpas are carrying everything, etc., at what point is it like not that big a deal anymore? Don't people climb Mt. Everest in the first place because it's an ultimate challenge?
For the same reason that people visit North Korea or Pripyat, they encountered it in popular or social media and added it to their bucket list.
There will always be dedicated mountaineers who view it (or K2) as the ultimate personal achievement but that number is joined more and more by the "wealthy instagram crowd".
https://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2024/12/16/everest-by-the-n...
Maybe they just want to go on top of Everest, that once was just for the professional mountaineer. People looking for challenges still have the K2 and others
Sure, I get that, I guess my point is more that there are things like helicopter tours to the top of Mt. Everest if you really just want to go to the top and see it. I get the "bragging rights" to be able to say I "climbed" Mt. Everest, but again I think it's pretty suspect if you didn't even bother to acclimate your body before the climb.
Climbing Everest hasn't been a big deal or the ultimate challenge for decades. Climbing it with your own skills, it would take years of training, and you'd likely want to work up to it by summitting numerous smaller mountains. But every year, hundreds of "mountaineers" who have never climbed a single mountain before, i.e. complete beginners, get to the top of Everest because the sherpas do all the work.
If you've never climbed a mountain before, you're a beginner mountaineer. If a mountain is climbed by hundreds of beginner mountaineers each year, it's a beginner mountain. These people don't have fitness or skills, they just have money.
You write a lot like LLMs do. Would be interested to know where you developed your style.
When I wrote formally (IE not on the internet), I used write similarly. I can't speak for OP but I learned the style when I was an IB student in theory of knowledge class (a long, long time ago).
It's a little depressing now because writing formally used to be an incentive to read the details, but now it is a signal that someone had an AI write something out of bullet points.
Did they also teach you to give snappy little titles to little different sections of writing? I find it a very odd but specific style of writing that has only recently risen in prominence.
Claude.ai :) I just wanted to put my notes in and get a suitable warning.
How is this different from simulation EPO production through other means or blood doping through transfusion?
Edit: my original question conflated EPO with blood doping
I think we need this approach. Like many protocols, if there is enough research and medical support we can develop ways to go beyond current limits. Not everybody can stay for 8 weeks in a foreign country just waiting. Faster expeditions will also mean less waste and crowding for the same number of people reaching the summit.
I mean, do we need people to summit Everest?
Industrialists gonna industrialize I guess. There’s an innate human demand to conquer nature, and an innate desire for others to make the things people want more achievable. We’d need a massive change in society to do anything else.
Who is "we"? What is your role in this issue?
Out of curiosity, what happens after you do an Everest climb? Does the increased production in red blood cells stay? Is it similar to how high altitude training works on cardio sports today?
I guess time will tell? Is this speculation or is there evidence of increased mortality from using xenon this way currently?